The Japanese Connection – Audition

There are three routes you can take if you want to be a film-snob, these routes of course often intersecting at grotesque and pretentious crossroads. They’re arthouse, indie, and foreign, the big bad three. F the first two, but let’s pause for a moment and examine the last. I’ve seen a few foreign films in my time, mostly Korean as of late (representin’*), and I’ve seen a lot of shit because of it. Granted my least favorite film of all time is American-made, and science-fiction, but a lot of Takashi Miike movies would be up there, as would Irreversible if I were in a crass enough mood (it’s got moments). We tend to view foreign films as a higher form of film art because the mainstream stuff is filtered in. We get Shaun of the Dead and In the Mood for Love because they’re so good they deserve international release. But I don’t think they put the live-action Wicked City on the Criterion Collection yet (I know because I’m looking for it).

These foreign films most Americans see, in addition to simply being good, don’t steep themselves in their culture to the extent where we might not fully appreciate what’s going on. Then there are movies like Audition, which is perhaps the most well-known, or second well-known after Ichi the Killer, Takashi Miike flick — a good movie that can be enjoyed on a base level, but requires minor, but further, knowledge of Japanese culture.

The reason Audition makes it to US shores is because it’s one of the most acclaimed horror movies in recent times, its claim-to-fame being a climactic torture sequence, as well as a particular limbless guy-in-a-bag who eats vomit. Gnarly stuff, the kind of stuff that American teens (and Eli Roth or James Wan) would definitely be into. For me, I wanted to see if this would be another Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance — a comparison that will be revisited later — and I was interested in seeing a Miike jab at feminism. Here’s a spoiler: it involves a lot of needles.

Without speaking down to you (because this is basically trivia), the thing to be aware of going in is that Japan, historically, has been behind the times on the whole ‘women’ thing. They like women, as most of us do, but seeing them as equal I believe wasn’t instant — like… it was here. Characters treat women as objects in a game in this movie, which is the premise, so we aren’t totally lost going in, but knowing context is helpful to pick up what Miike’s putting down.

Is it possible that after years of being assholes to women, there will be repercussions? That’s the question being asked here, and it seems to have a pretty straightforward answer, as you might imagine. It fucks people up, bottom line. Also, burning little girls’ legs with fire, that fucks em up too. I was interested to see this movie because it is Takashi Miike, a man who deals heavily in violence against women and movie rape, things I’ve given up on — mostly because of him. This must be his penance or whatever, though there do remain those uncomfortable moments. The difference here is that they’re supposed to be uncomfortable.

Also uncomfortable is the cutting off of limbs; the torture scene isn’t nearly as hard to watch as really any moment in Ichi, or the more extreme bits in Chan Wook Park fare, but it’s worth the price of admission, even for non-torture-porn fanatics. The movie truly shines though in its first and second acts. The setup to the darkness we know is ahead in my mind takes greater directorial strength than the 2001-like trip through layers of unreality, or the transcendent pain — it’s a slow-boiling family drama, one with humor and small, touching moments.

This is where I was engaged the most, because as ghastly as holding wife auditions is, I couldn’t help but feel for the character, his supportive friend Ishikawa, and his son. I actually liked them — Miike characters. But then the movie goes a bit haywire and a dream sequence of sorts takes us out of the emotional realm and into the depths of hell.

The character is drugged, and as he’s falling to the floor he gets visions of backstory for the girl character. I take issue with this sequence for many reasons, but chiefly, it doesn’t make any goddamn sense. We’re led to believe that he’s experiencing all of these things, that he now knows that the uncle tortured her. It’s possible he inferred it all in a fever dream, which also saw his late wife returning, but it’s hard to say. At this juncture, I was really lost, and it took me out of the movie. I knew what was coming next, so every time there was a false ending to this sequence I was getting more and more frustrated. Not necessarily because I needed to see the torture, but because I assumed it’d be up next.

So he goes all David Lynch, which stretches what could’ve possibly been a short film to feature length, and is an interesting move from an artist. It’s not something you see a lot, especially in a movie like this, which could’ve been just as satisfying with a pared down A-to-B-to-torture structure. I appreciate it, but didn’t really buy into it as fabric in the greater movie.

It’s not a huge problem, didn’t ruin the movie for me. I think the reason why I enjoyed Audition as much as I did is because I was able to see a real master work his craft without being demented by his own weirdly-o sigs. It’d be like watching Pulp Fiction for the first time after seeing Kill Bill and Death Proof — given you aren’t a fan of feet like QT is. Miike puts a lot of weight into detail. Notice the torture tools the girl uses — needles, wire, syringes — they’re feminine in that they’re finesse, less about blunt force and more about pinpoint tactics. She’s engineering his pain, talking him through it and being methodical. Half of the terror is psychological warfare, which trickles down to the audience very effectively: this chick is totally nuts (“deeper, deeper, deeper“).

As wild as this scene is, it really isn’t as bad as I imagined. I went into Audition as anyone would — anticipating some hardcore fuckedupperies. I wanted this to be another Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a movie you could show to a friend, preferably a female one, and be like, “This is the charming tale that gets a little dark. It’s about these guys who kidnap a little girl, and then things go south.” When they go south in Mr. Vengeance, they go south and never let up. Movie gets pretty rude. Audition doesn’t really, and I don’t think it’s the director holding back, rather it’s a measured dose of violence, despite its craziness — and tameness.

Miike doesn’t want to chance the ending becoming tongue-in-cheek. Every time Ichi kills somebody, it’s a gore-fest, but he’s being a bastard screeching and running around like a jerk, so it’s madly challenging to take seriously. Or handle, period. It’s almost an affront to the institution of cinema violence, but that’s why we have the blonde dude, I suppose. Auditiondoesn’t need the blonde dude, because it isn’t really about the violence, though that is the clear centrepiece. He’s using violence this time, not being used by it. So this time I didn’t really feel had by Miike. I think that this time, he was simply trying to do a good movie.

This isn’t to say that he doesn’t every single time set out to make a good movie, it’s more that he isn’t full of himself in this case. Let’s go back to white Takashi Miike for a moment: Audition is like the Reservoir Dogs of the Tarantino canon. It’s a solid movie, and it isn’t bleeding with Tarantinoisms. I happen to like Tarantino, so I liked Death Proof and even Inglourious Basterds. I don’t like Takashi Miike, but I did like Audition. If you’re looking for a place to start with the dude, duck his latest effort and go straight to this one. It’s low-key horror, chilling and intense while intelligently stopping short of lame-o torture porno.

*Not really. I might be Korean in flesh, but not in spirit, which is good, because it’s opened my eyes to the stupidity of taking pride in one’s heritage

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“because it’s opened my eyes to the stupidity of taking pride in one’s heritage”

Reminds me of a bit from one of my favorite comedians, Doug Stanhope:

“Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you’ve never met. All of a sudden you take pride in accomplishments you had no part in whatsoever. If you’re American you’ll go, ‘Fuck the French. If we hadn’t saved their asses in World War II, they’d be speaking German right now.’ And you go, ‘Oh, was that us?’ Was that me and you, Tommy? We saved the French? Jesus. I know I blacked out a little after that fourth shot of Jägermeister last night, but I don’t remember… I know we were going through the Wendy’s drive-thru to get one of them ‘Freshetta’ sandwiches that looked so alluring on the commercial, but then we ordered it and realized we had no money, and we had to ditch out before the second window, and those douchebags in line behind us with the bass music probably got our order and we laughed about that. But I don’t remember saving the French at all. I went through the last ten calls on my cell phone and there’s nothing from the French, looking for muscle on a project. I checked my pants; there’s no mud stains on the knees from when we were garroting Krauts in the trenches at Verdun. I think we didn’t do anything but watch sports bloopers while we got hammered. I think we should shut the fuck up.”

Anyway, I still haven’t seen Audition, despite everyone and their dog telling me how terrific it is, and I strangely have little desire to see it. I think that my hatred for Hostel is causing me to have an unfair “guilt by association” bias, since I know that Eli Roth made Hostel as sort of a tribute to Miike’s movies. Hostel felt to me like a movie made by and for idiot jock assholes, the kind of people who yell “don’t touch me, fag!” when you accidentally bump into them at a bar. I trust that Audition is better, since pretty much anything has to be better, but Roth has seriously fucked up my perceptions, like a rape victim who’s nervous around people who look like her attacker.

I did, however, recently delve into some other foreign films, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, followed by the first movie’s American remake, The Departed. I was expecting it to be one of those rare situations in which the remake is better, but it wasn’t. The Departed is a very good movie, but Infernal Affairs bests it in pretty much every way. I’m afraid that I’ll come across as a film snob when recommending it in the future, but I probably already come across that way to others anyway.

That’s funny because I too saw Infernal Affairs recently, though only the first one. Weighing in my mind which one I prefer (The Departed or Infernal) is difficult because I have a lot of bizarre nostalgia for the Scorsese flick. I’m really not a fan of the guy, but this movie was the first R-rated I’d seen in a theatre, and my friend and I thought it was the bomb, as we would. We were laughing our asses off at all the swearing, the violence, the acccents–it’s a fun movie. Infernal Affairs on the other hand is the much more sophisticated version, the one I can clearly tell is better. Andy Lau and Tony Leung are just as good as always, and the spiritual element is fascinating. Moments in IA actually moved me, like the scene where the gangster dies in the car next to Tony Leung, which was played (equally effectively) for suspense in The Departed: “I gave you the wrong address.”

For whatever reason, I really like Eli Roth, but I have yet to see a single one of his movies, unless Thanksgiving and the fake movie in Inglourious Basterds count. To me, he’s one of the gang–that posse of filmmakers I really appreciate, the Tarantino, Rodriguez, Wright crowd. When he shows up as an actor, I think that’s really cool. Just one of those things, I guess, but yeah I’ll never watch Hostel. I’ve never seen a single Saw either.

For nationalism and heritage, yeah it’s total bullshit. They operate on the same principles that keep racism alive today, which has spurred Morgan Freeman to epically (excuse me) denounce black history month in public. We need to break certain links from the past, while respecting others. They gave black people a month because of years and years of oppression, when it should be ‘black people have every month, like white people and dem yellers n reds, because they’re human.’ If this blog wasn’t totally (half) dedicated to movies and science-fiction, it would be a blog about racism and nationalism. Nothing gets me more heated–aside from movies about laser guns, of course

Ah, memories of the first R-rated theatre experience. I believe it was Die Hard with a Vengeance for me. (I was born in 1983, so I would have been about 12 at the time.) Hard to think of a better movie to start with. I still consider it one of the best action movies ever made.

Like I said, I really like The Departed. It does exactly what a good remake should do. Scorsese made the American version, the Martin Scorsese version, and he gave the film its own identity instead of just copying the original. But the actors in the Hong Kong version just wipe the floor with their American counterparts. The scene in which Tony Leung’s superior is thrown off a building right in front of him is touching and heartbreaking, but the American version is so blunt that it’s almost comical. Still, I like the American version, especially Jack Nicholson (the one actor in the film who’s better than his Hong Kong counterpart) and the new characters played by Mark Wahlberg and Ray Winstone. It’s not as good as Goodfellas or Casino, but I think the three movies form a nice little trilogy.

As for Infernal Affairs II and III, neither of them is as good as the first movie, but I enjoyed them quite a bit. Part II starts off merely decent and doesn’t get terrific until the second half, but when it gets going, it’s on fire. Part III seems to divide people, and I’ve had several people tell me that they outright dislike it. I found the ending a bit ludicrous (without giving too much away, one character puts a gun under his chin and pulls the trigger, but survives with no apparent brain damage), but I found it more or less comparable with Part II. Only half the movie focuses on the espionage; the other half is a more psychological focus on Andy Lau’s decent into madness following his actions in the first movie. Just make sure you watch the first film again before delving into the sequels, because they don’t bother to recap its events. (Actually, one scene does recap the ending, but it’s a twisted lie version of what really happened, so you need to have that movie fresh in memory.)

I don’t know much about Eli Roth as a human being, but I doubt that I would ever want to know the guy based on the kinds of characters in Hostel that he expected me to sympathize with. I thought the movie was going to be making some kind of commentary about “ugly Americans” getting what they deserve while acting like obnoxious twats in another country, but at no point was it ever apparent that I was supposed to dislike the characters. As for Saw, the first movie is worth watching simply because the core idea is so good, but the execution is mediocre. I’m glad I watched it, but I doubt I’ll ever have a desire to see it again.

Die Hard is an excellent first R-rated movie. Totally entertaining, and for a parent taking their kid, not that inappropriate content-wise. My dad felt kind of bad because he took my two sisters and I to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and that was my little sister’s first adult R-rated movie, which is pretty intense, and has that famed, gratuitous rape scene.

I would agree with the estimation that Jack Nicholson did outdo his HK counterpart. I did like Martin Sheen too, although his death scene was much less emotional. Those two scenes really do speak to the differences between Infernal Affairs and The Departed though — I wouldn’t call IA gritty, but it’s definitely heartfelt and spiritual. They’re both pretty intense, and the premise is great. I’m definitely interested to see the rest of the trilogy, although I will miss Tony Leung…

I’ve listened to a few Roth interviews, and he seems like a pretty cool guy. It must be the David Cronenberg syndrome — he always talks about how people expect a total weirdo when they meet him, when in reality he’s this incredibly articulate, soft-spoken guy, one of science-fiction film’s few philosophers. I suspect that Eli Roth’s issue is that he’s extremely counterculture — post-post-Scream, which is why his movies come off as overly extreme and mean-spirited.

I’ve never seen Saw, but seems like it’s probably similar to the Final Destination series, which also has a good premise that’s squandered by mediocre everything else.

You’ll miss Tony Leung in Part II, but not Part III. The second movie is a prequel which stars the young actors who played the characters in the first movie’s flashbacks, but the third movie is half sequel and half prequel. I think the chronology of the films goes like this:

That’s interesting, I was under the impression that at least one of them was a prequel, so I got it now — two and a half are. I remember those rumors about a potential Departed sequel, and everybody was wondering how they’d do it with all the characters dead. Suppose they can get as far as The Departed 2, and maybe The Departed 3.5, but that’s it…

The chronology is all over the place. They actually resort to on-screen graphics in Part III, showing the date and telling you that this scene takes place “18 days before Chan’s death” or something like that, and it keeps jumping around. I really recommend watching all three movies close to one another, in the order they were released, because you need the previous movie in recent memory for the current one to make sense.

They go in some interesting directions with the follow-ups. In the first movie, Andy Lau and Tony Leung are the main characters, and their bosses are minor characters. In the second movie, that’s reversed, so the bosses get fleshed out a lot more. They have a strange relationship; they’re on opposite sides of the law, but meet and hang out like friends, fully understanding what will probably happen in the future. It’s hard to imagine Martin Sheen and Jack Nicholson’s characters doing the same, but it could work. The actors are terrific, though I hardly need to point that out. Part III goes back to Lau and Leung, but the focus is mostly on Lau covering his tracks after the events of the first movie and dealing with the guilt over his actions.

I’m not sure where I would prefer a Departed follow-up to go. I liked the movie the most when it departed (hardy har har) from Infernal Affairs and went off in its own direction, so I don’t think I would want them to go exactly where the Hong Kong follow-ups went. A sequel would have to leave behind both the Andy Lau and Tony Leung characters, unless they went the psychological route and had them appear as hallucinations like in Part III, but I doubt they would do that. Maybe do a sequel following Mark Wahlberg’s character, fleshing him out a bit, but they could take a note from the foreign films and include some prequel elements. It’s not like you have to choose between prequel or sequel. Scorsese knows his way around non-linear storytelling.

I don’t know. Whatever route Scorsese would potentially choose, I would probably be happy with pretty much anything. I would love to see him revisit that world in any way. He’s gonna have to do a sequel to one of his movies one of these days.